Down to the Sea in Ships (28 page)

‘Montreal?'

Next come questions about a flight to Cebu for Reyje, the second engineer, a young man with an extraordinary haircut, like a guardsman's busby, and questions from Filemon, his deputy, about signing off in March.

‘What does your contract say?'

‘April, Captain.'

The Captain makes an eloquent shrug. Erwin asks, on behalf of the crew, if there might be fifty dollars available for new DVDs?

‘Yes, but after we spend three hundred of the remaining twelve hundred to update the anti-virus software in Montreal.'

There is a brief discussion about the lashing bonus. Like Glenn Cuevas, killed by a crate in Rotterdam, this crew will also be doing stevedores' work, because of safety regulations in Montreal, ironically. At least they will not be doing it while the cranes are working overhead, as Mr Cuevas was.

‘In Montreal they don't work the cranes until the cargo is unlashed, and the stevedores don't lash until the cranes have finished loading. That's five hours – we can't wait. So the crew do it,' the Captain explains. A bonus is paid in cash and everyone wants in – only the Captain and the chief engineer exempt themselves.

The meeting breaks up and Pieter offers a tour of his engine room. He shows me around with the same thoroughness with which John showed me the bridge. The engine is an eight-cylinder BMW two-stroke diesel, capable of 28,000 kilowatts of power. The heat and fury, the noise and the gigantic scale are all reminiscent of the
Gerd
but here brass thermometers protrude everywhere like periscopes. I find the engine control strangely touching. There is a control rod which descends from the bridge. There is a red knob and a brass wheel marked ‘More' with an anti-clockwise arrow. All this enormous complexity comes down to such a simple, humble control. Constellations of pipes and wires and washers and valves add up, in the end, to a shaft which you can spin ‘more', ‘less' and either way. We descend three decks to the level of the shaft, a grease-black whirl of constant motion (we must hope and hope) spinning eighty-five times a minute. The ship's tail narrows elegantly, like a ribbed fish, cold to the touch.

‘Colder in Montreal,' says Pieter. ‘You can hear the ice scraping along the sides. It's fine if it stays out there.'

We tour pumps, coolers, heaters and condensers. He stops by each of his charges and screams its function into my ear. There is a lot of fuel filtering down here because cargo ships use the cheapest, dirtiest diesel. ‘And fuel pumps are very sensitive things!' Pieter touches pipes, warm and hot; the very hot he pats. Moving parts are daubed lovingly with grease.

Reyje, the second engineer, and Jannie, the electrician, are working on a cylinder head for one of the generators: it has done 12,000 hours of labour since it was last cleaned; when they have finished it will be ready for its next 12,000. They conduct a conversation about a level measurement with Pieter almost entirely in sign language, topped off with a bit of screaming. Eight hours down here with two breaks, with the deck shaking and the roar gouging at the little plugs in your ears! It takes shipping, the history of shipping, to make this seem reasonable. For all the ferocities of the age of sail, it was steam that reintroduced hell to a seafarer's existence, hell of a day-to-day quality not seen since the slave galleys.

The ‘Black Gang' now refers to Customs officers; originally it was the appellation of the stokers and trimmers whose labour drove the turbines of the age of steam. R.M. Dunshea, apprentice on the cargo liner
Maimoa
, described the conditions in which her Black Gang fought the Battle of the Atlantic. The ship was twenty years old when the war began:

‘Each man had to feed his three furnaces with two tonnes of coal every four-hour watch, as well as slicing and raking the fires to ensure good consumption. At the beginning of each watch ash-pits had to be cleaned. Each watch was accommodated in a single, badly-ventilated room in the fo'c'sle. At sea with a seven-day week they had no diversions, in port they usually sought solace in dockland hostelries . . . many fell foul of the ladies, the effects manifesting themselves a few weeks later.'

Lady Nancy Astor suggested that merchant seamen be compelled to wear yellow armbands on shore, as a sign of their potential for carrying venereal disease. In 1938 she told Parliament that a colleague who had seen the way seamen lived ‘said he would not expect ferrets to live in such conditions'.

The young Eugene O'Neill came rather closer to the actuality of the stokehold when he shipped as a deckhand on runs between New York, Southampton and Buenos Aires. When ashore he frequented a New York dive called Jimmy the Priest's, where, O'Neill said, ‘you could sleep with your head on the table if you bought a schooner of beer'.

‘I shouldn't have known the stokers if I hadn't happened to scrape an acquaintance with one of our own furnace-room gang at Jimmy the Priest's. His name was Driscoll, and he was a Liverpool Irishman. It seems that years ago some Irish families settled in Liverpool. Most of them followed the sea, and they were a hard lot. To sailors all over the world, a “Liverpool Irishman” is the synonym for a tough customer. It was through Driscoll that I got to know the other stokers. Driscoll himself came to a strange end. He committed suicide by jumping overboard in mid-ocean.'

O'Neill addressed the conditions of the stokers in his play
The Hairy Ape
. His stage directions for its third scene are more telling than any photograph:

The stokehole. In the rear, the dimly-outlined bulks of the furnaces and boilers. High overhead one hanging electric bulb sheds just enough light through the murky air laden with coal dust to pile up masses of shadows everywhere. A line of men, stripped to the waist, is before the furnace doors. They bend over, looking neither to right nor left, handling their shovels as if they were part of their bodies, with a strange, awkward, swinging rhythm. They use the shovels to throw open the furnace doors. Then from these fiery round holes in the black a flood of terrific light and heat pours full upon the men who are outlined in silhouette in the crouching, inhuman attitudes of chained gorillas. The men shovel with a rhythmic motion, swinging as on a pivot from the coal which lies in heaps on the floor behind to hurl it into the flaming mouths before them. There is a tumult of noise – the brazen clang of the furnace doors as they are flung open or slammed shut, the grating, teeth-gritting grind of steel against steel, of crunching coal. This clash of sounds stuns one's ears with its rending dissonance . . . And rising above all, making the air hum with the quiver of liberated energy, the roar of leaping flames in the furnaces, the monotonous throbbing beat of the engines.

The lowest of the gang in wages and status were the trimmers, who retrieved coal from the bunkers, spread it out evenly at the feet of the stokers, raked out the ashes and disposed of them. The worst work of the men of the
Indian Empire
– as they flung coal up an incline in the holds of a ship on her side in the Pacific – was the daily routine of the trimmers. They bunkered coal and balanced its bulk, moving it around as it was depleted, to keep the ship level. As stocks in the lower bunkers were burned the trimmers shifted tonnes out of higher bunkers, so the longer the voyage went on the more labour they had to accomplish. The only concession to their health and safety amid the choking dust was a wet rag tied across the mouth.

Nor was it enough that the stokers should simply shovel the coal, as in O'Neill's description. They must also ensure it burned ‘like an incandescent cloud of vapour rushing from the top of coals towards the rear of the furnaces – it was not a “fire”, but a bed of incandescent fuel on the grate'.
¹
In wartime it was particularly important that this ferocious combustion was achieved: anything less and the ship would produce undue smoke and fall astern of its convoy, making it easy to spot and easy to sink. This meant a stoker had to be close enough to the blaze to use his tools effectively, the names of which speak eloquently of the work. He broke up clinkers of unburned coal with a slice bar, or dragged them out with a devil's claw. He raked the gratings clear of ash with a pricker bar and levelled the surface of the inferno with a firing hoe before adding more coal, and repeating the process. To complete the echo of the age of the galley slaves, the work in the stokehold on many ships was coordinated by the mechanical striking of Kilroy's Stoking Indicator, which beat a metallic time.

U-boat commanders knew where the guts of a ship were by the placing of her funnel. Directly below it, beneath the waterline, were the furnaces and the boilers. In the roar of Pieter's engine room, with the waterline above us, it is still difficult to picture the full horror of a torpedo strike: the explosion, the darkness, the burning oil and scalding steam, the screams of the injured and terrorised, the eruptions of flames, the in-gush of freezing water, and the press of men trying to get out through hatches buckled or jammed – and, for any who did get out, wearing the stoker's garb of vest and trousers, the bitter North Atlantic, slicked with oil and flame. If such a man made it to a lifeboat or raft he was extremely lucky. If he was not one of the first to die there from hypothermia, in cases where rescue was not quick, then he was luckier still.

There is a famous photograph of one such lucky man. He sits on the deck of the naval escort that has rescued him, one arm over the rail, one leg dangling below it. He wears a short-sleeved shirt. The wretched cork boards of a primitive life jacket are askew on his chest. He is covered in oil; the left side of his face shines as though moulded into a plastic mask. His eyes are narrowed almost shut and his mouth gasps blackly open, the human equivalent of an oiled seabird. He is not in the ship's sickroom, which suggests that he is a low priority case: much worse is taking place out of shot. Whoever holds the camera regards him as sufficiently ubiquitous that he can be photographed, rather than assisted.

The most comprehensive factual account of the merchant navy in the Battle of the Atlantic is Richard Woodman's book
The Real Cruel Sea
. In his acknowledgements Woodman pays one particular tribute: ‘For a powerful evocation there can be none better than that of Nicholas Monsarrat in
The Cruel Sea
, the reading of which was, in its navigational sense, my own point of departure', Woodman writes, deferring to an eyewitness and participant whose novel could not be more ‘real'.

Monsarrat served as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Voluntary Reserve.
The Cruel Sea
is a fictional shaping of what he saw and did on the Atlantic convoys, and his book stands alongside the work of Conrad and Melville as the most perfect and terrible testament to the era of seafaring it describes. The oiled survivor of the photograph might have come straight from its pages. Monsarrat saw and wrote about many such men, and also those who were less lucky.

In one episode, ‘The Time of the Burning Tanker', ‘the time that seemed to synthesise the whole, corpse-ridden ocean', Monsarrat describes a tanker of which the crew of his protagonists' corvette, the
Compass Rose
, has become particularly fond, in the way that convoy escorts became fond of certain of their charges: ships are characters, after all, a sum of their parts and the personalities of their crews and captains. This tanker has almost reached safety, having been shepherded and defended all the way across the ocean from Halifax, and is almost within sight of the Scottish hills when she is torpedoed. As she blooms vast fires the surviving crew gather on deck. The
Compass Rose
cannot go closer to them because of the heat of the flames.

And then, in ones and twos, hesitating, changing their minds, they did begin to jump: successive splashes showed suddenly white against the dark grey hull, and soon all twenty of them were down, and on their way across. From the bridge of the
Compass Rose
and from the men thronging her rail came encouraging shouts as the gap of water between them narrowed.

Then they noticed that the oil, spreading over the surface of the water and catching fire as it spread, was moving faster than any of the men could swim. They noticed it before the swimmers, but soon the swimmers noticed it too. They began to scream as they swam, and to look back over their shoulders, and thrash and claw their way through the water as if suddenly insane.

But one by one they were caught. The older ones went first, and then the men who couldn't swim fast because of their life jackets, and then the strong swimmers, without life jackets, last of all. But perhaps it was better not to be a strong swimmer on that day, because none of them was strong enough: one by one they were over-taken, and licked by flame, and fried, and left behind.

Reading the book on a trading ship on the same ocean, in the same weather, with the same sea hissing along the sides of the hull, it is almost unbelievable that any man who survived one crossing – over two weeks of fear for the slower convoys, daubed with terror and horror – should have had the courage to face doing it ever again. In 1941 the Essential Work (Merchant Navy) Order forced seamen between the ages of eighteen and sixty to register for sea duty, and barred them from working ashore. Sixteen-year-olds belonging to the Sea Scouts, Cadets and Boys' Brigade were encouraged to volunteer for merchant ships, though they were still too young to fight. What kind of men and boys they were is described by Commander Frederick Watt of the Canadian Boarding Service, who inspected ships gathered in Halifax awaiting convoys.

Certain nations, and within them certain shipping lines, maintained standards of performance that made them the front line of the maritime community. Their tradition of seamanship was as jealously guarded as that of any other long-established calling. These were the elite. There was also a type of independent-minded seaman who seemed to prefer a berth lacking spit and polish or an ordered future, who yet had his own brand of grainy pride, competence and dependability. But beyond that category were the embittered, the slovenly and the fearful – mariners to whom the sea was an economic fact of life, inescapable because there was nowhere else to turn. They were exploited by their masters on the basis of that hard truth.